The advice is to disconnect from Solana dapps and swap your SOL for different currencies
On August 3rd, in what was an unusual episode, the blockchain community watched in real-time as Solana wallets were drained of their assets. Thousands of wallets were attacked and millions of dollars were stolen. For a moment, people were powerless to stop it. And now experts need to find out what happened.
Summary
- No one is quite sure what’s happened so good advice is difficult to find and give. All users can do two things immediately to protect their assets: disconnect your Solana wallet from all dapps. Swap your SOL for another token.
- SOL price drops and TVL on Solana goes down in the wake of the exploit.
- Overall, it seems the damage will be limited and now engineers and security experts will need to uncover the vulnerabilities.
What’s happened?
No one is exactly sure what’s happened yet. What we do know is that on Tuesday evening (August 2nd), users began reporting the SOL in their hot wallets was disappearing. Hot wallets are connected to the internet, as opposed to Cold hardware wallets. Users are being advised to move their SOL to the latter.
What was unique about this exploit was the way in which people’s assets continued to drain from their accounts, even after the hack had been reported. The leak now appears to have stopped, and the reported number of exploited wallets currently sits around the 7,767 mark.
Reports vary and opinions differ on how hackers made off with so much SOL. One user on Twitter noted four prime suspects for the origin of the vulnerability, but none have been confirmed:
- Private key compromise
- Recent Phantom wallet update
- A malicious but trusted app
- An issue with a Chrome extension
Magic Eden was apparently affected by the exploit but has only acknowledged that ‘there seems to be a widespread SOL exploit at play that’s draining wallets through the ecosystem’.
The Solana Foundation said on Wednesday that ‘engineers from multiple ecosystems, with the help of several security firms, are investigating drained wallets on Solana’.
Whether or not the hack’s victims will get their SOL back remains to be seen. The likelihood, as we’ve seen with so many other exploits, is that they will not.
Solana on-chain analytics
So far, the price of SOL hasn’t dipped drastically. Given the sums currently involved, there’s no reason for the wider Solana community to worry about large-scale losses. The hackers have stolen less than $10 million; SOL’s current market cap is $13.9 billion.
Total value locked (TVL) into the Solana blockchain has fallen by 5.63% in the past 24 hours, which could be significant, given that it’s out of line with every other major blockchain TVL.
Solana NFT trading doesn’t appear to have been affected by the hack. Looking at DappRadar’s analytics for Magic Eden and OpenSea, it seems that users on the site increased by 13% and 14%, respectively.
Check out the marketplace rankings for yourself to see how Solana platforms have performed today.
The story goes on
As this story unfolds, we’ll bring you updates and developments from Solana and security experts. And of course, you’ll be the first to know if this episode has affected the network’s on-chain analytics.
